Teaching YA cancer Narratives: The Fault in Our Stars and Issues with Voicing Illness

Is illness treated as a commodifiable literary product?

• The Fault in Our Stars as example
  • Juggling cultural taboos of surrounding portrayals of illness, realism and accuracy according to lived experiences, and young adult themes.
  • Should illnesses such as cancer be used as a metaphors/vehicles for other themes?
    • Reflect onto Susan Sontag’s ‘Illness as Metaphors‘-> she believes in using science to dispel metaphor and myths
    • Others challenge this view: Can we ever strip illnesses such as cancer from metaphors?
• Arthur Frank’s three classifications of illness narratives:
  1. Restitution narrative (illness -> health, ‘happy ending’)
  2. Quest narrative (ending not importance, more focus on lessons learned/discovered)
     1. Would the movie Wit be an example of this?
  3. Chaos narrative (anti-narrative, time without sequence, reflection but non-reflection)
     1. Perhaps this is more of Anne Boyer’s approach in her The Undying book

Patients not only restore the experiential dimension

to illness and treatment, but also place the ill person

at the very centre of that experience.

Anne Hunsaker Hawkins
(1999)

• Cancer diagnosis as de-stabilizing/ de-humanizing, invasive
  • Importance of narratives to counter self- fragmentation -> producing identity and experience as the patient is experiencing it.

• Reflections:
  • Illness portrayals (commonly seen in mental illness)-> inaccurate in media/ inauthentic -> reading these accounts create incongruence-> stereotypes and myths do not aid interactions between others and the patient -> stigma
  • Important questions:
    • “Does this text voice illness, fictional or not, in a way that creates agency and empowerment for the reader or does it advance the cliché that proximity to death creates profundity?”
    • “Does the voice actually advance an understanding of illness or simply present an emotional melodrama?”
  • Jarring contrast between lived experiences of youths with cancer vs. the story -> perpetuate illness myths -> usurping of patient voice

“I do not exist to be your tragedy. I do not
exist for you to find special meaning in your life. I do
not exist to teach people lessons or to give people
feels.”

(Huang, para. 41)